Omni Supply Crafts | A Concept for Resupplies

Hey,
there already is a thread about supplying resources, yes I know. But I had quite a specific idea concerning fuel, ammo and repair supply. Let me explain:

Generally the need to supply one’s units with fuel and ammo is hampering and tedious. It tends to not add to the fun you have playing the game, as it is just one more thing that ‘has to be done, because it just has to’. Okay, that is generally true, BUT one might find a way of making the whole thing as less tedious as possible. All right, assuming you would find a way to do so, why would you want to have limited fuel and ammo in the game at all? Well, it adds an additional layer of tactical depths to the game.

“Is that so? Explain that!”

Okay, it’s pretty simple. An example: Imagine your opponent is on his way to you base with say 40 tanks. Thos tanks can go for 3 minutes at full speed, and then their fuel will be depleted. Say you base is 4 minutes away from where his tanks are coming from. So, to defend against this attack you know have two choices. Either you send you units to engage his approaching force directly, or you send a few fighters to take out his supply units, which will slow down his attack, so you can build some defenses and more units in the additional time you win by slowing down his advance. So it adds tactical depths to the game.

“Okay, but is this worth it?”

That depends on how you realize it. A cumbersome way to do it were having supply units that are built like every other unit in a land factory for example. A better way was to have a special facility for supply vehicles. Those automatically (optionally automatically) produce a global fix amount of supply vehicles that depends on the size of your army. So there is a supply vehicle/ current unit count (population) ratio, that is fix. This is because supply vehicles are cheap – maybe they cost even nothing. But therefore you can have only a fix number of them. Also you don’t need to build them manually if you don’t want to. You can set the supply facilities to ‘auto build’. Supply vehicles can be ordered to assist and supply control groups (you know ctrl + 1, 2, … 0), to auto supply with an area command (check this thread for area commands) or manually be ordered to assist and supply a certain unit or a selected group of units. Generally they are meat to act autonomously (like drones or so).

“All right, can you get more specific about those supply vehicles themselves?”

I thought of a hovercraft like vehicle, so it can assist land, water and air units equally. Because the supply vehicles can repair, refuel and rearm, and that with land water and air units, and have a hover craft like design I would like to call them “Omni Supply Crafts”. Because I like things to be consistent OMCs (short for Omni Supply Crafts) need to consume fuel and such themselves… how to realize that without the need of supply-supply vehicles? Solution: OMCs have an onboard ‘matter transformer’. OSCs need to reclaim objects (stones, trees, wrecks,…) to produce their own power for locomotion and to produce their core element – nano bots! How do OMCs refuel, repair and rearm several units simultaneously and how to let the whole process look convincing? The answer is nano bots. OMCs “spray” trillions of nano bots that then autonomously repair damaged vehicles, transform themselves into some kind of high-tech fuel, fly into tanks and transform themselves into fresh shells etc… Of course, as they carry a ‘mass transformer’-reactor thing they are fairly large – maybe like t1 or t2 transports form SupCom. Maybe the OSC also carry little repair drones that can swarm out (just for the visuals). This concept is consistent and might even look cool.
While this is the general concept, you might add things like an orbital supply facility that can produce supply drop-pods. If you are in imminent need of supplies and you have that facility you can drop some pods that contain Omni Supply Crafts.


Okay, so that was my idea. What do you think? Might it fit the game and add to the gameplay as I think it could?

I think this is far to micro for this game, and just a pan in the *** for all games with more units than 1-2 squads and even then I think it's silly.

Tactics = Micro
Strategy = Macro

The goal is to make this game much more macro than micro. Why would they want to add another Micro level to it?

resupplying only for aircraft please, in whatever way (fuel, ammo or max range from base)

I know the distinction. You want to add another level of micro, because it adds to the depths of the game, whilst being not really that much micro for the player, as it can work autonomously.

I feel logistics is strategy, but... if implemented well this is in between micro and macro (semi transparent until it explodes, giving strategic choice to players, adding value to harassing units), if poorly it will utterly hated micro.

But... If this is added for land sea and air, space I feel should not be ignored, but either you need fuel satellites or things just eventually die and you have to replace them.

I am opposed on principle it should work nicely in all 4 realms, land, sea, air and orbit, and the current suggestion only works for 3, ignoring or shoehorning the 4th is gonna make people angry.

I do not see the point of having units have limited ammo or fuel unless it was a balancing mechanism for the strength of the unit. Even then I would only really restrict that to Air units which tend to have the fewest available means to attack them, as well as being powerful for their speed. Even in their case, I would not make it too restricting, unless it was Strategic Bombers for instance.

Sure it adds realism, it adds some tedious depth, however it also reduces the Awesome level of the game, and we are not shooting for realism we are shooting for Awesome.

I think that one guy was right when he said that this forum is rapidly filling up with horrifically terrible ideas.

God awful, embarrassingly bad ideas.

Simulating limited fuel and ammo, necessitating resupply is NOT what PA is about. It's about fast, fun, and furious combat on an epic scale.

SupCom did have limited fuel for aircraft, and I didn't mind that because the landing pads made it easy to repair and refuel planes -- if you set up patrol paths they did it automatically. But limited ammo for aircraft would've gone too far. I wouldn't mind if PA had limited fuel for aircraft, as long as the game also had landing pads to minimize micro.

However, limited fuel and ammo for land units would be impractical. Firstly, if the Kickstarter trailer is any indication, units seem to be poorly armoured and will be destroyed in 1 or 2 shots, so it's unlikely that land units will survive long enough to need rearming or refueling. Second, unlike the air, there's limited space on the ground, so trying to get dozens of land units to R&R at a resupply hub would be a pathfinding and collision detection NIGHTMARE.

The air should have limited space, planes flying through each other is not a plus. Also why a resupply unit was suggested.

I don't like clipping, but it's more forgiveable for aircraft than land units, because there's a lot more vertical space than horizontal space. So even if it seems like aircraft are clipping, they could be passing over and under each other.

Regardless, clipping doesn't suddenly make unit resupply a good idea. It wasn't in TA, it wasn't in SupCom, it isn't in the vast majority of RTS games, and it doesn't belong in PA.

It's an interesting idea for a mod, but not for vanilla PA, because the majority of players won't like it.

Not in XXXX game is an AWFUL reason to reject something, players crashing asteroids into planets wasn't in TA or SC, we should get rid of it in that case. That argument could support not having any new features for any game.

I make no claims that it was a good idea, or that I liked it even. I thought it was interesting but as suggested had issues. I was just pointing out a flaw in a specific argument of yours. Making claims about what others want or not is not a real argument either, they can speak for themselves and it provides nothing constructive about the topic.

There's an obvious difference between a unique selling feature, like annihilating planets with asteroids, and the imposition of an unnecessary gameplay mechanic, i.e. refueling and rearming units. The former is OBVIOUSLY a brilliant idea, and is probably the primary reason why most of us backed PA on Kickstarter. Whereas the latter is inarbuably a needless annoyance, which is why it's not implemented in other RTS games. That should be apparent to anyone with the slightest bit of sense.

Are you a troll that just likes to argue for the sake of arguing? Because that's how that paragraph reads. You admitted that you were indifferent about the OP's idea, but you couldn't resist pointing out a supposed flaw in my argument against it. But I just as easily pointed out the flaw in your counter-argument.

I'm not interested in getting into an off-topic argument here.

It is good idea to test in the mod, but not a good enough to implement in PA. This is because when you play session on 9 planets with three moons each it is difficult to keep track of what goes in all your bases and you want fuel supply chain on top. This would more than battlefield strategy! It would be even more than sim city. It would be sim country economy. I think people wouldn't have patience to manage fuel and ammo on multiple planets, asteroids and moons.

I'm not trying to be a troll, I'm just tired of watching people making bad arguments that aren't logical at all. And calling things obvious, inarguable and insulting anyone who disagrees (as in lacking sense) does not refute anything, especially when you don't provide anything to back that up.

I am interested in having a discussion on some of the ideas posted, not two people ranting back and forth about who is more wrong, or everyone bashing an idea without reading it all the way through ignoring any potential merits it could have. Sometimes that means correcting misinformation so that the discussion can continue along the lines intended, regardless of where I stand on an issue.

Sure, logistics add realism, like in Wargame: European Escalation they have both limited numbers of units of every type, and also supply units to replenish fuel, ammunition, and perform field repairs.

Sure it resulted in some good plays of people using helicopters to destroy supply lines resulting in entire armies becoming stuck unable to move, eventually running out of ammo from protracted battle while stuck immobile.

But the game did not really take off, nor was it all that fun to play or watch. People were afraid to move from cover, were afraid that they would lose their supply units which if they lost all of them (and every unit is very finite in number) then it amounts to automatically losing the game, no matter how many good tanks or helicopters you bring in.


Supply lines, logistics, actually result in passive boring play as you are too afraid to take risks. At least for Aircraft they are capable of getting back to base and the supply pad in a matter of seconds to refuel, and even then if following SupCom system if the Aircraft lands they can slowly recharge their fuel battery so they can take off to fly back to base after a short while to resupply properly.

Land and Naval units do not have that luxury also because of path finding issues, especially in a game built around large scale army vs army battles, instead of small scale company vs company combat.